The present invention relates a method for conducting group travel, in which a subsequent group travel participant follows group travel participant travelling ahead or drives to a current destination of group travel participant travelling ahead. The term group travel participant refers to a participant of group travel. Within the context of the method, any number of subsequent group travel participant can in principle participate in the group travel. In the degenerate case, only one pair of one group travel participant travelling ahead and exactly one subsequent group travel participant takes part in the group travel. In principle, each of the group travel participant can use the service (for example, with a Smartphone) while walking or on a bicycle or with any other means of transportation. Also, within the context of group travel, a use encompassing more than one type of transportation (bus, rail, aircraft, taxi etc.) is possible.
The invention also relates to a system.
Furthermore, the invention relates to a vehicle. The vehicle may be a land vehicle, a watercraft or an aircraft.
So far, the known options for driving to a destination and/or to an intermediate destination with several vehicles on the same route are inadequate, when the destination or the intermediate destination are defined only during the journey or are changing during the journey. EP 1 681 663 B1 describes a method, wherein which route guidance instructions for a subsequent vehicle are calculated on the basis of current positions a vehicle travelling ahead and a subsequent vehicle. To form a travel group for group travel, a query participating in the group travel with a vehicle-specific ID and a position of the vehicle are transmitted by each vehicle to a central server. The server recognizes the shared identity of a group based on the considerable agreement of the vehicle positions.
With the known method, all group travel participant must the begin group travel in the vicinity of a common starting point. A problem arises that the group travel participant must not only start from a location in the vicinity of a common starting point, but that they must also arrive in the vicinity of the common starting point at the same time. At least one of these boundary conditions is unacceptable in many situations, for example when the group travel participant travel to a common destination (for example, a meeting location for a family celebration or for a lecture), but want to start the group travel from home or from different corporate sites, without the need to take a detour via the starting point of the group travel participant travelling ahead.
The known method also has a likelihood of causing confusion, when it cannot be ruled out that several travel groups come together at the same time (for example, on a parking lot of an airport or an exhibition center). In addition, with the known method, the positions of all group travel participant must be transmitted to the central server at the start of the journey. Therefore, a privacy issue arises for the subsequent group travel participant, namely that it may not be preventable without special arrangements that an identity and/or a position of subsequent group travel participant is intercepted during the transmission to the server or when the server is wiretapped. In this way, another person who is not a participant of the group travel may then obtain information about the identity and/or the whereabouts of subsequent group travel participant and may use this information in an undesirable way to determine who participates in the group travel and/or may use this information to begin tracking the subsequent group travel participant.